ABSTRACT
Sybille Knauss’s Eva’s Cousin (the German original, Evas Cousine, was published in 2000; the English translation by Anthea Bell in 2002) is almost entirely set on the Obersalzberg and tells its narrative based on extensive interviews with a cousin of Eva Braun’s who spent the last months of the war at Hitler’s holiday chalet. By focusing on Nazis and daring to explore the lives of Germans during Allied bombing, Knauss’s novel participates in the recent fl ood of texts about Germans’ experiences during the war that do not always portray them as monstrous perpetrators. This fl ood of texts comes in the wake of W.G. Sebald’s lectures, delivered in 1997, wherein he argues that the reluctance to represent Germans’ experience of Allied bombs should be replaced by refl ections on what it means to be victim and perpetrator at once. While the sense of the forbidden, thirteen years after Sebald made these remarks, attenuates-due precisely to his arguments-it still remains true that, in writing from the viewpoint of the Nazis, Knauss, who was born in 1944 (the same year as Sebald) to Nazi parents, enters a taboo zone. But in the forbidden zone Knauss creates Nazi characters who are to some degree horrifi c but who are also deeply sympathetic.1
